Charles Wilson, top brain surgeon, dies at 88

By Richard Sandomir, New York Times

Published
7:07 pm EST, Saturday, March 3, 2018

Charles Wilson, a pioneering and virtuosic San Francisco neurosurgeon who used operating rooms like stages, sometimes performing as many as eight surgeries a day, all while building a leading brain tumor research center, died Feb. 24 in Greenbrae, California. He was 88.

His wife, Frances Petrocelli, said he had been living in a skilled nursing facility and had recently developed a heart problem.

During more than 30 years at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center, Wilson worked on parallel tracks: in the operating room and in his research center, where he and colleagues sought to advance the treatment of glioblastomas and other tumors.

Dr. Alex Valadka, chairman of neurosurgery at Virginia Commonwealth University, compared Wilson to the renowned cardiovascular surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, who turned Baylor College of Medicine in Houston into a major center for heart surgery and research.

"Through a work ethic that would kill almost anyone, Wilson built academic, training and research programs," Valadka, who is also president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, said in a telephone interview. "And then there was his clinical work. He was technically excellent. He set the bar."

Wilson sometimes worked in three operating rooms simultaneously: Residents would surgically open and prepare patients for his arrival, and he would then enter to seal an aneurysm or remove a tumor before moving on to the next case.

"He never spent much more than 30 or 60 minutes on each case, and we were left to close the case and make sure everything was OK," Dr. Mitchel Berger, a former resident who is chairman of UCSF's neurosurgical department, said in an interview. "It was unorthodox, but it worked. He demanded excellence and we gave him excellence."

They also gave him silence. He allowed no music, no ringing phones and no idle chatter. Scrub nurses were expected to anticipate his requests.

"He would manage any break of silence with a stern look," said Dr. Brian Andrews, a neurosurgeon who was one of Wilson's residents and also his biographer, with the book "Cherokee Surgeon" (2011). (Wilson was one-eighth Cherokee.)

Wilson became world renowned for excising pituitary tumors through the sinus in a surgery called transsphenoidal resection. He had embraced the procedure, which had been done for decades, after being displeased with results that UCSF surgeons had achieved using another technique.

"He was a visionary in how he built a multidisciplinary approach to studying brain cancer, linking basic science and clinical research together," Dr. Susan Chang, director of the division of neuro-oncology at UCSF, said in an interview. "He was able to set up an infrastructure to test new therapies on tumors and spare patients the side effects of treatments."